


Incendiary

by Sildae



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 14:30:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9127804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sildae/pseuds/Sildae
Summary: Old habits die hard. And trust...well. Trust was always the hardest for Sabine to dole out.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Posted originally to tumblr; archiving to AO3.

Like any planet, Atollon had its own palette.

It wasn’t the jeweled pastels of Garel, with its ridges of soft light, any defined lines lost in the dense purples of its mesas and plateaus. Or Lothal, all gentle, rolling gold and brilliant blue that stretched from horizon to horizon, so bright it hurt the naked eye. Or the sulky shadows of Concord Dawn, sullen and dull before giving way to the heavy cowl of night.

Or even Mandalore.

The muscles along Sabine’s jaw jumped and she reset her aim.

Another krykna had broken through Chopper Base’s security line two days ago. It got all the way to the main storage hanger before Zeb’s (terrified) roar brought backup running. "I hate bugs," he’d muttered for hours afterward. "All bugs." Chopper had lodged three krykna legs into Zeb’s bunk the next night.

But dealing with a breached line didn’t _explain_ the breached line.

Sabine had a hunch, and after one particularly interesting conversation inside the base’s command center, she decided it was time to follow said hunch. Which, for now, meant laying flat on her belly against a rapidly cooling rockshelf, one blaster trained out across the now-familiar line of sensor markers and her wrist blinking a slow, steady green.

A puff of air pushed through her bucket’s seal, pressing against the sweaty stick of hair at the nape of her neck. Sabine ignored it.

Just a little bit longer…

Streaks of pale orange and bloody red clawed at the horizon, where the day fought its way into retreat. Shadows stretched in long, sharp lines across the sand. Nothing else moved, not even the tiny reptiles she’d spotted earlier, though their scales still glittered against every low-growing clump of succulents they seemed to prefer.

Another minute, and the last of the sunset faded.

Two more; she blinked, and her HUD compensated, the desert blooming into a wash of gray, tainted by the base’s spotlights behind her.

On one particular embankment, just past the sensor line, a lump of rock hadn’t budged for the past hour—but then it moved.

Her wrist blipped yellow.

There!

" _There_ you are." Hera’s voice carried from behind Sabine.

Sabine didn’t bother holding back an irritated huff. Next to her left boot, sand crunched against stone as Hera stepped close.

"The intel came through," Hera went on, ignoring Sabine’s silence. Her voice was too calm, modulated. "We’ll need to move out at dawn."

After another minute—in which the rock twitched again, like a stathas egg, ready to hatch—Hera sent more sand skittering down the rockshelf’s face as she sat cross-legged next to Sabine.

Hera was always tenacious about this sort of thing. "Sabine, if you don’t want to go on this mission, I understand. Mandalore—"

"Is my _home_." Might as well get it over with. Sabine angled up, off her stomach and into a crouch, one blaster still ready. "And you might want to get ready. I think some of our friends are about to visit."

Oh really?" A little wry humor colored Hera’s voice, but she did as requested, the slender blurrg steady in her hand. "And that’s why you’re out here?"

Sabine bit back something impulsive and unnecessary. "If you must know, yes." The thought of Mandalore didn’t need to get that far under her skin. "I don’t think Zeb wants to become spider food anytime soon."

"Mm-hm."

Sabine rolled her shoulders and shook off a prickly surge of temper. "Mandalore is my home, Hera. I couldn’t go back after…after what happened at the Academy. You _know_ that. But my family—" Sabine couldn’t stop herself; she glanced down at her armor, at the smooth curve of plastoid, familiar as a second skin. "They’re still there. And they need me, if Mandalore is ever going to be free."

A silence sat between them for a minute, heavy beneath a weight neither one of them wanted to acknowledge.

Sabine knew Hera—knew how Hera thought, what made her tick, clear as a stet-bomb. How the Jedi had proved themselves on Ryloth; how the fate of the galaxy rested on whether the past could be resurrected.

But Sabine wasn’t so sure it could be that simple. Or that the past…was ever really that good to begin with.

She knew enough of Ryloth and its history, but—still—Hera hadn't grown up in bio-domes constructed out of the bones of a planet-wide genocide, or watched the ghosts of Jedi blades, dancing in sandstorms that reached high into the atmosphere, lingering long in the shadows of a cataclysmic desert.

Sabine’s aunt and uncle had always been careful, but they hadn’t lied to her.

And Sabine’s mother...

Mandalore's _new_ history was just as hard to reconcile. "I want to go in alone," Sabine said.

"That’s not how we work around here."

"Oh really? And what was Ryloth?"

"That was different, and you know it."

"No, it’s not."

"Sabine—"

"It’s not going to go well if I bring in two Jedi." It was absolutely the truth, and she’d already said as much, but the fact that they wouldn’t listen—well. "It won’t be good if I bring in a non-human, either. Just trust me on this."

Her mother’s hatred of the Jedi ran about as deep as the Derish Gorge. Not that Sabine needed to bring that up around Hera.

Or the rest of the crew. Ever.

And the rest of the paranoia had been carefully bred for the past ten years. Sabine had seen it up close. It was ugly.

But Hera...was Hera.

"Ryloth used to be great. Used to be wealthy. Admired. My father—what he wants, more than just independence, is the ability to stay free, to be strong enough to stand alone. But he forgets…" Sabine watched Hera from the corner of her eye, saw the way the tips of her headtails twitched. “He always forgets that we’ve never stood alone. And to get back to what we were, it takes trusting each other.”

Sabine shifted on her knee. She couldn’t respond to that.

"What we fight for," and now Hera’s words were careful, but not hesitant, "it’s bigger than just one planet. It’s bigger than the galaxy itself."

"I know." It came out too strong, especially after Hera’s admission. "I know," Sabine repeated, softer. "But that’s not the point here."

It never was.

Hera was silent again.

Across the sensor line, the rock twitched. Sand slithered around it, a trickling stream of grainy gray through Sabine’s HUD.

"I don’t want you to do this alone," Hera said, this time, her voice firm. Sabine clenched her teeth. "We’re a team, and a team—"

"Is only as strong as its individual parts, yeah." Sabine snorted. "Heard that a million times." Usually right before an instructor encouraged sabotaging another cadet’s efforts.

"—is, in many ways, a family itself," Hera went on. "But like you said," and again, Hera’s voice was wry, "that’s not the point here."

"Look, Hera," Sabine began, but Hera cut her off.

"You’ve proven yourself over and over, Sabine. You’ve shown me that you can lead your people." She gestured with the blurrg; vague and conciliatory. "I trust your call on this."

Sabine hesitated, staring fully at Hera. On Sabine’s wrist, the light winked red. "You sure about that?"

Hera nodded, head tails swinging. "Absolutely."

"Well, in that case, put on your goggles. It’s about to get real dusty."

And then the sand exploded around them, shrieking with a dozen scrabbling, bloated carapaces.

* * *

An hour later, Sabine stood at Hera’s side and admired the play of light and color against the night sky. Even the moons were accommodating, hanging low enough that they framed it all in a twin halo of silver, brilliant against the plume of fire.

"Who knew their webbing had so many trace chemicals?" Sabine studied the colors threading through the fire, the plumes of crimson and purple, green and yellow, as pretty as rhydonium. "We can use that."

Hera glanced askance at her. "Don’t get any ideas."

Sabine shrugged. "I’m just saying."

Hera pulled her goggles up, leaving creased circles of sand around her eyes and looking vaguely owlish beneath all the grit.

"How’d you know about the cave system? Even our sonar scans missed them."

Sabine hesitated. She’d been tinkering with solid-earth depth charges since she’d been old enough to hold a soldering iron—and setting them for just as long—but revealing those particular tidbits of her misspent youth…

She’d been fighting at Hera’s side for years, now.

Maybe it was time.

"I’ll show you," Sabine said, tossing one leftover, unarmed charge to Hera. Hera caught it easily and examined it in the light of the fire. "On Mandalore."

_fin_


End file.
